Facebook Is Coming For Your Children

This is insane and should never be allowed.

Its bad enough that minors are able to set up accounts so easily anyway.

I was pre-Internet era, so the likes of Facebook have never had a grip on me. Yet all the colleges I've visited when giving a lecture, all the teens seem to be bothered about is Facebook and everybody else's business.

I for one will NOT under any circumstance allow my children on Facebook. I have the router set to block access to that site and will never allow it.

I want my children to grow up wondering about the world and its complexities, not about other peoples affairs and status updates.

I remember my parents used to be friends with one of our neighbours. She always knew what everyone was up to on the street as she made it her business to know. My mother used to remark just how ''bloody nosey that woman is''. It wasn't considered a good thing to act that way.

Now look at society, everybody is becoming that nosey neighbour, racing to peer into other peoples lives whilst wars begin to dawn outside their windows.

Apathy has never had such a successful hold and now it wants our children

so what ? does anyone really think that < 13s are not entering fake ages ?

Whats all with the Facebook hate? Like children didnt use far worse social networking sites before. The most popular social network site in my country before Facebook was one associated with the biggest local email server - azet.sk - full of sexual chat rooms, bitches selling ther services, and almost every other user was some form of freak, having nude pictures in open albums (fun fact: the owner of the site lately got his account hacked and his now publicly known password was "iamadick" ) And as far as I know almost all 12-13 year olds had email and profile there, because there was simply no other more decent localised option for internet communication back then.

Facebook is a relatively safe site with good privacy settings. I cant see a reason why even 10 years old cannot use it to communicate with friends and schoolmates, assuming you check the profile regularly, set privacy settings to provide best protection and do not share sensitive information in the profile. To openly ban your children from using it in all circumstances is IMHO overly protective and may be even counterproductive.

reply to post by NeverSleepingEyes


sounds like good advice for the normal, not-so-naive parents.

unfortunately, most parents are not at this level.

FB is a well financed, for profit business venture.

FB is now looking for a gov "sponsorship" package.

financiers do many "studies" for target populations prior to "putting up the money".

the targets are the parents as well as the kids .... just depends on WHO the perps are !

they thrive on all the "intelligent" thinking and "anylizing" ....... those people have more to take !

by the way, what's in YOUR wallet these days ?

I'm unsure how Facebook plans to do this. Last time I checked, the under age 13 thing was a federal law. Maybe I'm wrong on that.

reply to post by FatedAxion


He is (Zuckerburg) going to lobby congress, spend millions
and change the law. Facebook is also hiring Ambassadors.

*bleeper*

facebook is so unhealthy for both the individual and society's collective psyche. kids' minds are so malleable, i can only imagine how facebook will effect their development. i think it should be shut down altogether, though. i'm so tired of being in social situations where people are on their precious little iphones, updating their statuses and whatnot. the irony is overwhelming, because they are telling all their 'friends' what they are doing, but really they aren't involved in what's going on because they're on facebook...

This is so obvious that Mark is trying to extort money out of lil kids, Facebook revenue is most coming from those game apps and advertisement. If you get more little kids on facebook then the more money they are going to spend on farmvile and other crap games.

The IAO needs wants to make sure it gets all the information on the next generations...

Surprised no one has posted that video yet.

FB says a lot of things about security, and it is probably true that unless you choose to share your info then other users will have a hard time getting it. But what they DON'T tell you is that they use the information for themselves, regardless of your privacy settings. Every time you send someone a message or comment on their wall, it is being record and sold to companies that create adware which infects your computer. Every time you play a game, it is sold to those interested in what type of games you like(so they know what type of popups to display). Everytime you fill out one of their dumb questionairs which get sent to everyone you know, companies are getting this information as well. Then you have the secrets thing, where you can unlock what someone said about you(many people dont know you can do this), but you have to spend more time on facebook to get enough coins to do so. FB is as addicting as many drugs out there, and it can cause the same types of problems. It can cause a person to lose their job, their family and even endanger their health. Men and women get tempted to cheat on their spouses using it, women leave their husbands because they feel neglected due to a facebook addiction. I've seen people put more into the web site than a full time job. I have seen families break apart because of it, i've seen people hurt because of it and i've seen people ripped off, not to mention the viruses put on people's PC's due to the adware. And this is something we want to give to children?

As for parents being parents, yes I agree, in a perfect world that would be a logical choice, but this is far from a perfect world. In a perfect world parents would identify relatives and friends who molest their children(and yes it usually isn't the stranger across the street if you look at the statistics). Parents would be more cautious who's house they send their kids to, and whether or not the pastor at church is being too over friendly or not.

Parents today are too quick to see the perfect babysitter, whether it be an over friendly person or a computer. If parents would be parents, then we wouldn't have to spend billions of dollars tracking these guys and placing laws that in reality, do not work. Statistics show that most sexual offenders do not re-offend once they are identified and get treatment, again its usually somebody the parents and/or child knows very well. What we need to worry about are the offenders that are NOT known, it could be anybody and as paranoid as it seems if you want to protect your kids, then do what I do, assume ANYBODY can hurt them no matter who it is.

But you see, this isn't going to happen because parents find it to be too much work despite what they say in public. We need to watch our kids, we need education and awareness programs for the parents and the kids at a young age. We need to know who they are around and when. I'm not talking about background checks because odds are the person who hurts your child will have never been caught before, i'm talking about knowing what are kids are doing with them, what they do and talk about, etc. I'm basically talking about being parents, using some common sense and not trusting the politicians to keep your kids safe because they really don't care. They dump millions into programs that don't work, monitoring offenders and all this stuff. Hey, here is a plan, if they are a risk to the public, don't put them on a list....put them in JAIL. Most offenders never get any jail time, they go from sentencing to probation in most cases. Now this is fine for the young guys who made a mistake, but the 50 year old perv needs something to make him think twice about doing it again if and when he is released.

So there ya go, streets are safer, parents know how to protect their kids and we aren't dumping billions in tax money on what is nothing more than a false sense of security. Of course it will never happen, people are fools. People elect politicians who pass one stupid and expensive law after another...most of which get ruled unconstitutional then the offender is set free with no strings attached. Well there is nothing unconstitutional about putting the real risks in jail at the time of sentencing.

Oh and kids don't belong on facebook, thats like sending your 13 year old to a night club.

The solution is simple as I outlined above, but actually getting people to make it work is near impossible. It would involve a complete 180 turn from the way we do things now.

Think i'm wrong, try this. Get some family monitoring software, one that runs in the background in secret. It records keys typed, takes screenshots and records all chat and other activity...which is usually sent directly to your email. Put it on there for a month, and you'll see what your kids and even spouse is into....you may be surprised, in fact, I know you'll be.

Right ... Zuckerberg says, "Allow kids under 13 yrs of age on facebook".....says the man who doesn't have kids.

I'll bet the farm if he was a father AND he wasn't the facebook founder, he would think it's sinful, immoral and dangerous to encourage or to allow children on facebook.

Clearly, there's something terribly wrong with him.

reply to post by Maslo


Apparently, you don't have kids.